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arXiv · 2209.14627

An Equal-Size Hard EM Algorithm for Diverse Dialogue Generation

Yuqiao Wen·Yongchang Hao·Yanshuai Cao·Lili Mou
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Abstract

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to interact with humans through natural language texts in an open-ended fashion. Despite the recent success of super large dialogue systems such as ChatGPT, using medium-to-small-sized dialogue systems remains the common practice as they are more lightweight and accessible; however, generating diverse dialogue responses is challenging, especially with smaller models. In this work, we propose an Equal-size Hard Expectation--Maximization (EqHard-EM) algorithm to train a multi-decoder model for diverse dialogue generation. Our algorithm assigns a sample to a decoder in a hard manner and additionally imposes an equal-assignment constraint to ensure that all decoders are well-trained. We provide detailed theoretical analysis to justify our approach. Further, experiments on two large-scale open-domain dialogue datasets verify that our EqHard-EM algorithm generates high-quality diverse responses.

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Yuqiao Wen, Yongchang Hao, Yanshuai Cao, Lili Mou. 2022-09-29. An Equal-Size Hard EM Algorithm for Diverse Dialogue Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14627

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